Firm Management Discusses Palo Alto Office and Firm’s Strategic Plan for Growth in The San Francisco Daily Journal

The San Francisco Daily Journal recently profiled our Palo Alto office and the firm’s strategic plan to realign all our offices, particularly those in California, to focus on our core strengths firmwide. The firm has recently expanded our corporate team in Palo Alto with the hire of new partners Nicholas O’Keefe and, most recently, Robert Claassen, while also further strengthening our litigation capabilities in Northern California with the addition of Philip Giordano, formerly a trial lawyer at the Department of Justice, as antitrust counsel.

According to Kaye Scholer Firm Managing Partner Michael Solow, “We found that the clientele that requires our kind of service and is willing to pay for our kind of service, with the size of our deals and the complexity and the speed at which they’re done, those clients exist in great numbers in Northern California.” He added, “Even if they’re not based in Northern California, they’re attracted to lawyers who reside in that part of the world because they know the lawyers have done those kinds of deals.”

The publication identified Corporate Partner Diane Holt Frankle as “one of the driving forces of the expansion of the Palo Alto office,” with her active slate of mergers & acquisitions and corporate governance work, while also noting the “unusually tight knit IP group” resident there, which includes Partners Peter Root and Stephen Holmes. Office Managing Partner Michael Malecek, who also serves as co-chair of the firm’s Intellectual Property Department, said that the Palo Alto office is profitable and expected to get even stronger. “The firm is of a size where it can focus on leveraging its strength in intellectual property, private equity and strategic M&A,” he said, continuing, “It takes time and it’s not done overnight, but we are making great progress.”